“Kit, we’re goners!” he exclaimed; “the ship’s going down!”
“I don’t believe it,” Kit answered, “but something has carried away.”
They both ran for the companionway and scrambled on deck, where the terrific wind almost tore them off their feet. Everything was dark as pitch except for the light of a solitary lantern, and by that faint light they saw that in the heavy rolling one of the winches had broken loose and was rolling from side to side of the deck, to the imminent danger of both deck and rail; and men were trying to lasso it with heavy ropes, for no one could approach it without risking his life. While they watched, the winch was caught and secured, and they returned to the cabin.
About two o’clock Captain Griffith came down with the relieved look of a man who had just rid himself of an aching tooth. “We’re all right,” he said, as the steward brought him another cup of coffee. “We’ve just sighted Sombrero light, so we’ll not visit Davy Jones’s locker just yet. It’s time for you to turn in, Henry.”
Harry started off for his berth, and Kit and the Captain had a little chat over their coffee.
“I don’t like being off a rocky coast on a bad night,” the Captain said. “The North Cape is good for any kind of weather, but the ship has not been built yet that will stand a night’s pounding on the rocks. Now by afternoon we should be off St. Kitts, and from that all the way down to Barbadoes you will see some of the finest sights you ever saw in your life. I have seen the Alps and most of the best scenery in Europe, but never anything to equal these beautiful islands we will soon pass—St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Martinique, Dominica, and several more. Most of them are mountain peaks rising from the sea and touching the clouds. Barbadoes itself is flat and uninteresting, except for being the most thickly populated bit of land on the globe. It contains only about forty square miles, and has forty thousand inhabitants, or a thousand to a square mile, mostly negroes. But you will soon see for yourself. I feel quite ready for a sleep. Good-night, Silburn.”
“Good-night, sir,” Kit answered; and he made his way across the unsteady cabin by holding on to the backs of seats, and was soon in his own berth.
By the middle of the afternoon the young supercargo learned another of the advantages of being in his new position. They were then skirting the coast of the British island of St. Kitts, having left the storm and the worst of the rough sea in their wake. Instead of taking a hurried look at the shore over the rail, with both ears open for the Captain’s bell, as the cabin boy must generally do, he could go up on the bridge and take a good look through the Captain’s glasses; and he was soon convinced that Captain Griffith had not at all exaggerated the beauty of the scenery. He was used to high hills, for Huntington is surrounded by them, but not hills like these.
“To think of a mountain coming right up out of the water,” he said to himself, “and going on up and up till the peak is in the clouds, and looking as green and smooth as the grass in a park—though I know it’s not grass, for the Captain says it is fields of sugarcane below, and trees toward the top. And the way those clouds gather around the peak! It seems to catch them as they float by, and they grow thicker and blacker every minute till there is more water than they can hold, and it comes down without warning in a deluge of rain, and then the sun shines again! I never saw anything like it.”
Then the next day he was equally enthusiastic over the French island of Martinique, which is much larger and has many peaks instead of a single one; and soon afterward the British Dominica, with scarcely any inhabitants in its high mountains but the fragments of the once-powerful race of Caribs, who live now by making baskets so tight that they will hold water and are used for trunks. As they passed the little port of Roseau, the capital of Dominica, they saw a large steamer lying at anchor, which Kit learned was the New York mail steamer the Trinidad, bound like themselves for Barbadoes; and within the next hour she was under way and following in their wake.